Regions in the Belt and Road Initiative

Jonathan Fulton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367194321
• eBook ISBN: 9780429514395
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Economic Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Introduced in 2013, China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has had a significant impact within Asia and across other regions. This book provides empirical case studies examining the relations between China and the states in specific regional groupings, including South-East Asia, Central Asia, South Asia, the Persian Gulf, the Horn of Africa, and Central/Eastern Europe.

At the theoretical level, Buzan and Waever's work on regional security complexes is used to develop a framework for analyzing the current impact of the BRI and its potential future effects within these regions, while the case studies explore the extent to which different International Relations and International Political Economy theories explain change in these relationships as the regional security environment shifts. The contributors address questions as diverse as the domestic political and economic drivers impacting the level of BRI cooperation; the effects of cooperation with the US; as well as the historical political and economic risk considerations for China in pursuing BRI cooperation; and the motivations of regional responses to the BRI and rivalries and variations in those responses.

This book will be of interest to academics working in the fields of Chinese foreign policy, International Relations, International Political Economy, and area studies. Professionals in the corporate world and Governmental practitioners and non-government agencies will also find the contributions useful.

1 Responses to the Belt and Road Initiative

A regional perspective

Jonathan Fulton

The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), referred to as “the most significant and far-reaching initiative that China has ever put forward,” is increasing China’s power, influence, and interests around the globe.¹ It was announced in 2013, the same year David Shambaugh published China Goes Global, a major work in which he argued that China is – and would likely remain – a “partial power”; a global trading superpower but one with a broad yet shallow footprint in other indicators of international power such as global governance, security, economics, culture, and diplomacy.² Given the more ambitious turn in China’s international orientation in the time since, one assumes that Shambaugh would adjust his analysis somewhat were he publishing the same book today. While much commentary about the BRI is breathless and exaggerated, it is undeniable that it represents a major shift in China’s approach to international politics. In each of the power metrics Shambaugh described we have seen a growth in Chinese capacities since the BRI was rolled out. This has happened during the same period that the United States’ relative power has declined, making for a more even playing field than in the post-Cold War era.³ In this systemic transition away from unipolarity toward a nascent multipolarity, the BRI represents Beijing’s preference for a future international normative order. This book is an analysis of how this is taking shape across regions in the first stage of the BRI. In order to address this, we need to first look at what the BRI is, how and why it has come about, and the responses it has inspired.

The BRI is a series of infrastructure construction and investment projects that fit under two large umbrellas: the seaborne Maritime Silk Road Initiative (MSRI) and the overland Silk Road Economic Belt (SREB). Initially envisioned as having a focus on Eurasia and the Indian Ocean Region (IOR), its scope has since broadened as China’s ambitions have grown, and the BRI has come to include Latin America, the Arctic, and space. As O’Neill emphasizes in Chapter 7, the BRI has its roots in the “Going Out” (zou chu qu) policy of the 1990s. Recognizing that Chinese firms needed to transition beyond domestic markets and become internationally competitive, Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs) began to reorient to states and regions where they previously had little to no presence. As a result of this aggressive global outreach, China had accumulated approximately $3.2 trillion in foreign reserves by the time the BRI was announced in 2013.⁴ At around this time the development needs across Eurasia and the IOR were painfully obvious; a report from the Asian Development Bank (ADB) estimated that Asia was in need of approximately $8 trillion worth of infrastructure investment between 2010 and 2020.⁵ Existing institutions like the ADB, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund did not have the capacity to address this shortfall, and regardless were not perceived as especially attractive partners in large infrastructure projects. David Dollar, formerly of the World Bank, described its limitations in comparison with the BRI:

Only about 30 percent of World Bank lending is for infrastructure these days. Having run the largest infrastructure program in the World Bank, I can say that it’s extraordinarily bureaucratic. Mostly, clients don’t like to come to the World Bank because it’s just too time consuming. It takes many, many years to get things going. China is offering to finance infrastructure, not at highly concessional terms, at what we would generally call commercial terms, but frankly at interest rates that most of these countries could not get from any other lender, unless they jumped through the hoops to go with the World Bank.⁶

It was in this environment that the BRI was rolled out in a series of events in late 2013. In September of that year, Chinese President Xi Jinping gave a speech at Nazarbayev University in Kazakhstan. Beginning with romanticized Silk Road imagery, Xi described relations between China and Central Asia as facing “a golden opportunity of growth” and expressed his desire to cooperate to “strengthen trust, friendship and cooperation, and promote common development and prosperity to the benefit to all our peoples.”⁷ He then announced his plan to build the Silk Road Economic Belt, articulating five types of issues with which China and Central Asian states could enhance cooperation: policy consultation, road connections, unimpeded trade, monetary circulation, and increased understanding between each other’s populations. These would later be revised and revealed as the five cooperation priorities found in the BRI white paper, “Vision and Actions on Jointly Building Silk Road Economic Belt and 21st-Century Maritime Silk Road” (hereafter Vision and Actions). Former Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev was at the event with Xi and expressed agreement in collaborating with China on this new Silk Road. Given the existing membership of China and the Central Asian states in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), this policy announcement appeared to be building upon SCO relationships, and nothing from the speech indicated an expansion of the SREB beyond Central Asia.

In October, President Xi delivered a speech to the Indonesian Parliament in which he called for “a more closely-knit China–ASEAN community of common destiny so as to bring more benefits to both China and ASEAN and to the people in the region.”⁸ Calling for the establishment of the 21st-century Maritime Silk Road, he presented a five-point strategy of somewhat vague goals: build trust and develop good-neighborliness, work for win-win cooperation, stand together and assist each other, enhance mutual understanding and friendship, and stick to openness and inclusiveness. He suggested upgrading the China–ASEAN Free Trade agreement with the goal of expanding trade to $1 trillion by 2020 and announced the establishment of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), stating that it would prioritize development projects in ASEAN states. He said that China was interested in enhancing security cooperation with ASEAN states, focusing on “comprehensive security, common security, and cooperative security.”⁹ He also called for greater people-to-people exchanges between China and ASEAN countries. As with the speech in Kazakhstan, this speech appeared significant mostly as an expansion of existing relationships and did not represent a bold policy shift for China.

One month later, the significance of these two speeches became clearer, as the Third Plenary Session of the 18th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (CCP) formally endorsed the construction of the Silk Road Economic Belt and the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road. This gave the initiatives much higher profiles and linked them under the name Yi Dai Yi Lu, or One Belt, One Road (OBOR).¹⁰ Soon afterward the scope of the initiatives started to come into greater focus. Throughout 2014 and 2015 a wide range of bilateral agreements was announced as part of the initiative, and planned multilateral programs such as the Bangladesh–China–India–Myanmar Economic Corridor indicated that its geographic focus extended beyond Central Asia and South-East Asia, across Eurasia and the Indian Ocean.

The BRI, as articulated by China, represents a “new model of international relations” based upon

mutual respect, fairness, justice and win-win cooperation, and forge[s] partnerships through dialogue rather than confrontation and friendship rather than alliance. All countries should respect each other’s sovereignty, dignity, territorial integrity, development path, social systems, and core interests, and accommodate each other’s major concerns.¹¹

The focus is on economic and developmental projects rather than hard power projection, reinforcing President Xi Jinping’s assertion that the BRI “is not a tool to advance any geopolitical agenda, but a platform for economic cooperation.”¹² To this end, Chinese officials emphasize language like “inclusive,” “harmonious,” and “open to all” when discussing the initiative.¹³ Another important point that China’s leaders have insisted upon is that the BRI is an initiative (chang yi) rather than a strategy (zhan lue). In fact, after releasing Vision and Actions, the three ministries that published it – National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and Ministry of Commerce – issued a statement on standardizing foreign language translations of BRI, emphasizing that words like “strategy, project, program, or agenda” should not be used.¹⁴ The distinction here is important: an initiative in this usage indicates a call for action which provides a public good, while a strategy implies a plan that aims to achieve a security or trade advantage at the expense of a competing state.

China’s careful messaging of an apolitical initiative aside, many have concluded that the BRI is an inherently political and/or strategic undertaking. Nadège Rolland, one of our most astute analysts of the BRI at this stage, reminds us that “roads and railroads crisscrossing Eurasia are not just meant to facilitate cargo transportation; they have a strong political component.”¹⁵ Callahan refers to it as an ambitious grand strategy: “to use economic leverage to build a Sino-centric ‘community of shared destiny’ in Asia, which in turn will make China a normative power that sets the rules of the game for global governance.”¹⁶ Benabdallah takes a similar view of the BRI, describing it as both Sino-centric and a means of diffusing alternative norms and practices. In her view, th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• List of abbreviations
• 1 Responses to the Belt and Road Initiative: a regional perspective
• 2 Localizing China’s Global Silk Roads through the “17 + 1”
• 3 China’s Belt and Road Initiative in South Asia: unique characteristics and general framework
• 4 Central Asia in the Belt and Road Initiative: policy-taker or policy-shaper?
• 5 China’s Maritime Silk Road: the Horn of Africa and Red Sea
• 6 The Gulf monarchies in the Belt and Road Initiative: domestic, regional, and international pressures
• 7 Bumps in the Maritime Silk Road: domestic politics and the Belt and Road Initiative in ASEAN states
• Index